The Harvesters

“Afrikaners is plesierig, dit can julle glo (Afrikaners are fun, that you can believe),” runs the chorus of the rustiest chestnut in Afrikaans folk music. It isn’t heard, much less proven, in “The Harvesters,” South African writer-director Etienne Kallos’ muscular, mood-rich debut feature. Unusual within the annals of its national cinema for its searching examination of the country’s once-dominant, now-dwindling white Afrikaner population, this sternly moving, vividly shot rural drama draws quasi-Biblical resonance from its tale of teenage foster brothers locked in a familial and cultural power struggle on a remote farmstead. That a low-key queer undercurrent courses through the conflict somewhat broadens the festival and distribution prospects of the film, the fine social divisions of which will nonetheless be unfamiliar to many outside viewers; in a Cannes edition heavy on auspicious debuts, this is among the most excitingly complete.

It says much about the out-of-time nature of life in the Bible belt of South Africa’s central Free State province — a flat expanse of scrubby yellow plains and maize fields, a million miles and yet not a million miles from the American Midwest — that it’s initially hard to tell what period Kallos’ film is even set in. Only once a cellphone appears in this rigorously visualized world of dateless khakiwear and ascetic midcentury furnishings can we tell for sure that we’re not still in the apartheid era, when white Afrikaans families like the one portrayed here were most prioritized and protected by ruling politicians. Now, nearly a quarter-century into the country’s rocky democracy, they seem quaint relics of a dark past, endangered by the very insularity of their community and, more directly, a drastic uptick in farm murders across the country. If not necessarily as racially driven as the infamous “kill the boer, kill the farmer” campaign of decades past, it’s a clear and rising threat, awareness of which young matriarch Marie (a superb Juliana Venter) drums into her young children with startling bluntness.